Weekly News Quiz for Students

Now, as Palestinians and Israelis hunker down for the second week of an intense conflict, a series of deadly events has galvanized both sides in a region where the human cost of war is all too familiar.

Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed area of two million people, had killed at least 197 Palestinians, including 92 women and children, between May 10 and the evening of May 16, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

In the other direction, missiles from Hamas—the militant group that has controlled Gaza since 2007—have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least 10 Israeli residents, including two children.

Israeli strategists and representatives describe the Gaza campaign as being aimed at destroying as much of Hamas’s infrastructure as possible, including the group’s network of rocket factories and underground tunnels.

But Israel has come under increasing international criticism for the growing number of children who have been killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Among the deaths have been eight children killed in a single airstrike at a refugee camp.

The new recommendations caught state officials and businesses by surprise and raised a host of difficult questions about how the guidelines would be carried out. But the advice came as welcome news to many Americans who were weary of restrictions and traumatized by the past year. Setting masks aside in restaurants and on sidewalks, in museums and shops, could represent not just the beginning of the end of the pandemic but hope for a return to normalcy.

The decision resolves a 2019 lawsuit brought by a coalition of students and advocacy groups. The plaintiffs said that the college entrance tests are biased against poor and mainly Black and Hispanic students—and that by basing admissions decisions on those tests, the system illegally discriminates against applicants on the basis of their race, wealth, and disability.  

But the College Board, which produces the SAT, has insisted that students are disadvantaged by inequities in the education system, not tests, and that basing admissions decisions strictly on grades tends to boost opportunities for wealthier, more advantaged applicants.  

Some 225,000 undergraduate students attend University of California schools, and the settlement this week makes the system the largest and best-known American institution of higher education to distance itself from the use of the two major standardized tests.

The lottery, whose legality could raise questions, will be paid for by federal coronavirus relief funds, Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said during a statewide televised address.

“I know that some may say, ‘DeWine, you’re crazy!’ ” DeWine said on Twitter. “‘This million-dollar drawing idea of yours is a waste of money.’ But truly, the real waste at this point in the pandemic—when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it—is a life lost to COVID-19.”

As of May 16, more than 59 percent of adults had received at least one shot. Providers are administering about 1.98 million doses per day on average, about a 42 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13.

Since their introduction in 1980, Post-it Notes have become a ubiquitous office product, first in the form of little canary-yellow pads—billions of which are sold annually—and later also in different hues and sizes, some with much stickier adhesives. There are currently more than 3,000 Post-it Brand products globally.

Spencer Silver worked for 3M, a manufacturing company in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the central research laboratory developing adhesives. In 1968, he was trying to create one that was so strong it could be used in aircraft construction.

He failed in that goal. But during his experimentation, he invented something entirely different: an adhesive that stuck to surfaces, but that could be easily peeled off and was reusable.

It was a solution to a problem that did not appear to exist, but Silver was certain it was a breakthrough.

For years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, has been pummeled by criticism that its inductees were too homogeneous, and that the secretive insiders who create the ballots—a group of more than 1,000 artists, journalists, and industry veterans—showed a troubling pattern of excluding women.

This year the voters seem to have listened: The class of 2021 includes seven women in the 15 individuals being inducted. The latest inductees show a balance of genre and generation that has come to be a feature of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s expanding tent.

Every day, thousands of hooks and nets meant for fish end up catching seabirds—a global problem that is pushing many seabird species to the brink of extinction. But no fishing gear may do more damage than the gillnet, which entangles and kills at least 400,000 seabirds each year.

What if all it took to save them was a pair of googly eyes?

It’s not quite that simple, but a team of scientists, conservationists, and engineers is developing a device that has the potential to save many seabirds from gillnets. This device, known as the looming-eyes buoy, is essentially a floating scarecrow.

A prototype was recently tested in Estonia. The results of the study suggest that looming-eyes buoys can reduce the number of seabirds by up to 30 percent within a 165-foot radius. Although the looming-eyes buoy won’t completely solve the problem, it’s a step in the right direction, experts say.